The Chocolate Ocelot's Pouch

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Saturday, 27 August 2016

Writing a block buster

WARNING: contains self-regarding nonsense

I've been trying to get a game down on paper – on digital I
guess – since the weekend and am completely tied up in knots and stressed to
fuck about it. Which is completely stupid because a) it shouldn't be this
bloody hard and b) nobody asked me to write this, nobody's paying me to write
this, nobody knows I want to write
this. I made up a rod for my own brain and am now beating myself up with it. I
can't move past it and can't resolve it, being a monotasker of singular
intensity, which is great when I'm on top of the task at hand – nobody can
clear moss out of the paving blocks on a driveway like me – but a complete
fucking crippling deadlocked disaster if I'm unable to complete the task. In
this case, unable to even bloody start
the task. It's in my head, swirling and crashing against my forehead like a
scratched CD or the Tasmanian Devil, and I can't resume anything like a normal
mental life until I get this sorted. Somehow.

Arse.

Write what you know, they say, so instead of trying to write
the thing that I want to write, I'm going to attempt to use a loophole in my
brain's stupid monotasking rules and write about writing about the thing that I
want to write. I think meta-writing is allowed. Perhaps by just splurging out
every thought I have about my problem I can get this bastard problem out of my
head, maybe get the actual thing I want to write about sorted and done and
dusted or failing that, at least express my frustrations here in a way that
maybe gives me some insight into a way forward, or failing that even, gives me
some small satisfaction that I've written something
even if it is just this meta-flagellation. Sometimes I think I just need to get
a certain word count down and recorded to stop my head from filling up and
harming itself. Maybe that's why other people keep diaries and proper writers
write. It's not for the fame or to get an idea across or to entertain others.
It's to stop their brains from filling up. So I'm just going to start squeezing
my mind and get all the idea-pus out and keep squeezing until it all comes out
in a jumble and my brain bleeds clear and true. It might empty my brain with no
clear useful thoughts set down here, but It Will Be Out Of My Brain, and that
is a good thing. For as long as I can remember, I have feared forgetting things.
Whether it’s the name of an actor in a TV show, the secret identity of a
superhero, or a cool idea for a game I once came up with, the thought of losing
that thought is terrifying. Like Dr Hans Zarkov, formerly of NASA, once said:
don't take my mind – it's all I have.

So – and I apologise for the overuse of so in this – let's
call the problem what it is – block. Writer's block I guess, but that is
probably a self-aggrandising term considering I've hardly written anything to
get bloody blocked in the first place. It's more like thinker's block at this
early stage. It's not like I'm stuck at chapter 7 or anything. How to describe
what it feels like? It's like… it's like I have something, part of an idea for
a book/game, but not all of it. No, that's a rubbish description. First off
this book/game is a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) thing – a very particular
sort of writing, which probably doesn't help. A strangely structured story with
multiple paths to the ending or multiple endings. It requires story writing
skills plus game writing skills and a very particular approach to structuring
and balance, as the reader has agency when reading it – they choose to go left
or right and are thus invested in the material in a way that differs from
passively reading a conventional fiction book from start to finish. It must
feel fair to them, like they had enough information to make the right choice or
at least feel as if they had a chance of 'winning', if indeed winning is an
option, and if it isn't I suppose that I ought to state that in the
introduction to the CYOA.

But I'm straying here – what I'm supposed to be doing it
describing my thinker's block. OK, so I've an idea for a CYOA. I got this idea
at the weekend, possible on Sunday. Probably in the bath, which is a terrible
cliché but it does work for me sometimes. As does going to the loo or doing the
washing up. Enforced 'creative thinking time sat in front of the laptop' is
sometimes the very last thing I should do. Anyway, it had been a
semi-unsatisfactory weekend for various stupid reasons; hours spent searching
for a computer security reader so that an online game could be played, guilt at
not organising my time enough to visit my family for a couple of hours,
frustration at trying to do some relaxing model painting only to discover that
some of the paint had dried up and the brushes were manky, and sadness that
someone seems to have replaced my formerly excellent close-up eyes with old
person's eyes which go all blurry when I bring a model up close to paint. In
many ways I am the opposite of Colin the Forger from The Great Escape played by
Donald Pleasance. I can't see close
up to work and people six feet away are not
a blur.

So I was frustrated and feeling unproductive. Unproductive
is bland word. Maybe worthless. Stupid, right? But if I haven't achieved useful
things every day I feel rubbish and black sadness starts to creep in. I refuse to
name it the D word because I think that makes it real. Also I dislike the
metaphor of the Black Dog because I like dogs and it in no way feels like a dog
to me. If I had to describe or characterise it, I would call it the Tar Pit, sans
woolly rhinos (a reference which will only make sense if you had an Aurora
model kit in the 70s), because it's deep and cloying and sucks me in and makes
it hard to breathe.

Actually that's probably worth mentioning – I'm finding it
hard to catch my breath. The air quality this summer in our area has been shite.
I'm on the Ventolin several times a day which is very unusual for me. It
occurred to me this week that being slightly short of breath all day is almost
certainly a sure way to experience constant low level anxiety. The perfect
breeding ground for other problems.

Sorry, I still haven't described the block. What it's like…
It's like there's an idea or a bunch of ideas crashing around in my head, but
they're all only partly formed. I can't catch onto to one without it melting
away the moment I turn my attention to it, like trying to grab your reflection
in water – a lazy metaphor I must have pinched from somewhere. I am unable to
focus, to concentrate. The sheer, sheer pressure
of wanting to get it down on digital and out of my head is interfering with my
ability to calmly organise it mentally. I simply can't hold a thought about the
CYOA long enough to get it all out. Sure, I've made an attempt – I've got a
small 2-page word doc knocking around that I started to write this week, and a
3 minute voice memo on my phone. I guess they indicate some sort of progress,
but it's nothing like the coherent 'story ideas' I've seen written down in – I
dunno – Alan Moore scripts.

That's another thing – I get very depressed that (shit –
sorry – I used the D word) as soon as I have an idea of an idea I think that it
can't possibly be as good as something Alan Moore or indeed any professional
writer could write, and I get very intimidated and the spectre of failure
creeps in. I mean, there are so many writers out there, people who wrote their
first Victorian detective story at the kitchen table before getting the kids
off to school, or down the pub in the evenings. How come those people can do
it, and I can't? I don’t have kids to worry about or even a very demanding job.
Christ, I've hardly had anything to do at the office the last two days and could
easily have skived it, writing the CYOA right there in the office quietly, but
no - I couldn't. I'm too caught up in the block and panic about the block and
frustration and Tar Pitness - Tar Pity? - about the panic.

What is the block like? It starts off not as a block but as
the initial surge of the idea in the bath, something that is a feeling of an
idea that could be a cool thing to write – a general emotional impression of
the sort of thing I want to do (a choose your own dinner party, if you can
believe such a ludicrous thing). It's like a surging fire inside, a wave of Feeling
and Idea that if I can just surf the crest of and think it through to its
complete shape, I can get it down on paper and out of my head and feel happy
about it. Christ, I think as long as I got the idea out of my head and on
digital, I would probably be OK if I didn't actually write the whole thing out
properly, just a structure from start to end and the characters and so on. So I
was surfing this wave of creativity, feeling it inside me, getting out of the
bath and then, I dunno, I lost it. I fell off the wave and it rushed past me
and I've been trying to catch up with it ever since. The wave is in me and
rushing past me. It's like a merry go round spinning far too fast in front of me.
When I was on it, it was fine, I was going at the same speed as it and it was
all good, but then I fell off or threw myself off and now it's far too fast for
me to jump back on. I keep trying and reaching out my hand and I cling on for a few
minutes and start to get up to speed but then I slip off again and the merry go
round keeps rushing around and around in front of me. I can't turn away from it
or turn it off. I need to get back on it or I need it to be gone like it was
never there.

Now I could at this point mention how I have trouble knuckling
down to work on things like this. How the washing up and sorting out my comic
boxes and watering the plants seems like being productive. Hell, it is productive, just not productive on
the thing that is most important to me – writing something, creating something.
I will leave nothing else in this life but the things I write. I don't build
buildings, or make movies or save lives or have babies. When I am gone there
will be nothing left of me but words and ideas. And if I don't get them down
then I will limp through life knowing that I have wasted my time and added
nothing, left nothing. My mind is all I have. But sometimes I think it hates
me.

Sorry, that all got a bit dark. So, the block. It's whirling
and bouncing and yelling in my head. I have bits of ideas for this fucking CYOA
but I can't get it sorted and coherent enough to the point where the merry go
round runs smoothly to its conclusion, slows down and goes quiet. So let's call
a temporary halt to all this navel gazing and meta shit and look unblinkingly
at the idea and try to get it down. I'll just bung it all down in any order so
that hopefully a lot of the jigsaw puzzle pieces are at least on the table.
Then maybe I can see them all in one go and start to rearrange them, find the
edge pieces at least and maybe make up some of the missing corner bits.

I really should have ended this on the 'I think it hates me' bit, as that is kind of cool, but I really did go on to write another 3000 odd words on the actual game, which I have not shown here, just in case I get the bastard thing written. At the time of posting this up, it's still not written, but I have at least started it. The Tar Pit still has me in its clutches, but I am reaching spastically for a handy vine to pull myself out. Or is that a quicksand metaphor?